Literature and Politics from a microcosm called Delaware. Here all the multifaceted players across the great capitalist contradiction are reduced to a few actors: a handful of banking and chemical oligarchs squatting in châteaux, a stable of artists downwind who either take inspiration for amnesia and roses or take a stand, challenging the living to repair a polluted world.

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"writes with authority and insight into the factory world. He brings his lively cast of characters to life, puts us there with them on the job. The book is funny, irreverent, and touching." Jim Daniels

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Neocons and neoliberals party on while Andean Indigenous evolve toward revolution in a country a lot like Ecuador

Pinhead #5

In the The Wedgehorn Manifesto, Steven Leech advocates preserving the legacy of Delaware literature, especially that which was produced by Wilmington authors. It exposes the flaws in today’s environment and suggests remedies for a cultural revival.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Brainwashed

Earlier today I was watching CSPAN with my sister and my housemate. CSPAN were airing a countdown to the House Health Care Bill debate, showing the motley protest in front of the Capitol and taking calls.

One call especially caught my attention. The caller, who was opposed to the bill, declared: “Health care is a privilege, not a right.” He didn’t sound the least bit crazy. He was just stating what he felt was a natural born fact. In this world, the caller figured, some had and some didn’t. He didn’t happen to have health care at the moment, but he didn’t trust the government to do it right. If he got sick and died, he figured that was the way it was supposed to be. It was what he deserved.

The caller was an easy guy to laugh at, but on the way home, I thought about it.

I have my own health care horror story of sorts. It’s quite a tale of woe, but I’ll give you the short version here. Almost exactly three years ago, I tried to push my car out of a snow drift. Afterwards, I felt a pain above my right knee. After the pain persisted for more than a week, I had the leg x-rayed. The doctor said I hadn’t broken anything and gave me some naproxen, saying whatever it was should clear up in a week.

It didn’t. Gradually, my body fell apart until it got to the point I could only get around with a walker. (Actually I probably should have used a wheelchair, but I stubbornly refused. Pride, you see.) I was in mind-numbing pain. But somehow I always managed to get my butt out of bed and go to work — even as my legs grew as twisted as the roots of an old oak tree.

It eventually took four surgeries over one year and six days to rebuild me. I avoided the surgeon’s knife for as long as I could. Part of the reason was because I’d never had surgery before and hadn’t spent much time in a hospital since the day I’d been born. But the main reason was because I was scared to take the time off of work and admit I was that broken.

Because once I admitted that, I was vulnerable and I knew it.

I’m better now, though not perfect. I walk with a cane and a rolling limp, but at least I’m not in pain. But my sickness cost me my job — and in a little over a month — my health insurance.

And even though I don’t want to admit it, there’s a part of me that believes, just like that CSPAN caller would, that somehow this is all my fault. It wasn’t just my body that failed; it was me. And my personal failure was a drag on everyone else’s premiums and so it was right I was kicked to the curb. Sickness is expensive, y’know, even evil, stifling sacred profits. I was the bad guy.

It’s hard to live in a country all your life and not be brainwashed — at least a little. Yes, I can be an American Idiot, too.

***

Right now Congress is debating the Health Care Bill. They’ve been at it for at least 90 minutes. (Or they could be done. I don’t know. It was too nerve-wracking to watch in real time. I’ll check the post-mortems in morning.) Hopefully, they will do the right thing and pass the bill. It’s far from perfect, but at least it’s in the right direction.

Someday in this country healthcare will no longer be a privilege; it will be a right that seems just as natural born as the status quo does today. And someday a serious illness will no longer make you feel like you are somehow less of a human being — and that you should be thankful for whatever little you get.

4 comments:

Thanks for writing this Franetta, we are so susceptible to internalizing the controlling and dehumanizing information coming at us from society. Maintenance all the time huh? Love always to hear from your searing intelligence and insights. karoline wileczek

The civilized world looks at the U.S. in wonder and bemusement. The most powerful country in the history of the planet will not provide health care for its citizens.

The U.S. has seen fit to engage in military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq for the better part of a decade. When all is accounted for, these wars of choice will have cost many lives, damaged many more lives, families and communities, and have exhausted trillions of tax dollars.

These misadventures have coincided with a deepening trend, begun about thirty years ago, of redistributing much of the nation's wealth from the lower and middle classes up. It is as if a nostalgia for the 1930s gripped the decision-makers in the three branches of government. They have about gotten their wish.

The drumbeat started even before the Reagan presidency and the message was repeated and eventually found its way into policy: government agencies charged with overseeing the public's welfare are incompetent and should be dismantled. By shifting funding away from the institutions that were designed to "level the playing field" and to protect the small and weak from the excesses of the large and powerful, the message became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course the FDA is incapable of keeping food safe and inadequately tested drugs off the market. Its back was broken and its teeth extracted long ago. Substitute the FTC, EPA and/or any number of other amalgams of alphabet and the pattern is the same.

Somehow, many U.S. citizens have been induced to swallow all of this, along with the message that health care is best left in the hands of profit-making entities. Among the means that health insurance corporations use to increase profits is to make certain that as little care is provided to premium payers as possible. The handful of executives atop these corporations benefit handsomely while supposedly enhancing the portfolios of their stockholders. As a lifelong stock market investor, I am not convinced that is really what has happened. Rather, I see many CEOs and board chairs enriching themselves at the expense of anyone they can. They use legal means to the same ends that motivated Bernard Madoff.

Meanwhile, the U.S. expends more than 1.5 times as much of its GDP as does England on health care and 1/16th of its people are without coverage. Many more live in fear of losing theirs. When pundits of the right proclaim that many of these 45 million or so choose to go without, it rings about as true as saying that people who choose to dine from dumpsters do so by choice, not necessity.

I have, as usual, been long-winded. No one "deserves" to be kicked to the curb when taken ill. Illness is not a judgement upon the character of the afflicted, any more than good health is a sign of morality or the lack thereof for that matter.

Rather, the casual rejection of those who have lost their livelihood and their resources due to illness reflects poorly on the judgement of a people who are willing to believe a big lie, repeated ad nauseum.

Eventually, the pendulum of public sentiment will swing back from its long arc to the right. The problem for many is, it will be too late. No one deserves to be thrown away because time ran out.

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Broken Turtle Booklist is a catalogue of Delaware regional authors, local publishers, and literary communities operating in Delaware. The Booklist includes audio and video recordings of Delaware authors, as well as their major works. It provides easy links to Amazon, Paypal, or publishers for folks who want to buy. Each month, we will feature a selected work by a Delaware author.

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To get your free copy of Steven Leech's The Wedgehorn Manifesto, write us at publisher@brokenturtlebooks.com. Also, Leech is now making a number of his other works in new editions available in PDF format.

What others have been saying about The Wedgehorn Manifesto:

Leech's writer's voice is from the heart, carrying lots of knowledge without pretension. He has a poets's feel for the way words work, and a jounalist's sense of the significant. Wedgehorn Manifesto marks, I hope, a turning point in the effort to preserve from destruciton the habitat in our collective memory of the many talented story tellers, poets, picture makers, and musicians who helped make life bearable for innumerable ordinary folk, and in fact made possible the fine cuture of the luckier few.

-Jonathan Bragdon, Wilmington born artist now living in Amsterdam, Netherlands

The Wedgehorn Manifesto is a call to action, a demand, an impassioned plea for the recognition, respect, and support of Delaware's artistic cultural past, present and future.

-Pat gibbs, columnist, The Wilmington SPECTATOR

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Dreamstreets showcased progressive artists, photographers, and writers of the Delaware Valley from 1977 to 2006. A beautiful record of the most vital—if often marginalized—cultural productions of an era. Features two centuries of Delaware's literary heritage. Now includes audio and video files.